Pax Autocratica (PC) Early Access Preview

In my recent coverage of a press release about Pax Autocratica, I mentioned that Pax Autocratica presents itself as a “satirical colony sim FPS Roguelite.” I suggested that I think that’s a lot of genres to try and squeeze into a single game. Well, now that I’ve gotten my hands on a review copy of Pax Autocratica and spent some quality time with it, I’m prepared to give you an idea of how well Pax Autocratica performs at cramming in each of those different aspects. By order of the State, I shall now begin your debriefing process.

In Pax Autocratica, you play as what’s called a “Leader” in the military of the State of Auroria, led by “the Father of the People” (aka “the Great Father”). Pax Autocratica is set in the year 2645, so you can probably imagine all the high-tech weaponry and wonders you’ll encounter. Contrary to what you might expect, though, your story doesn’t exactly begin after you’ve led your troops to a decisive victory in battle against the enemies of the State. Rather, things kick off when you find yourself strapped into an interrogation chamber under threat of immediate execution.

You were brought in for questioning because, in your most recent battle, you and your troops were reported missing for a period of 73 hours. You and your entire squad were captured by an enemy faction called the Urslan, who are basically like the Borg from Star Trek. The Urslan can overtake the minds of any opponents they face and assimilate them into their hivemind. You’re the only member of your squad who returned from capture alive. You’re the first recorded case of anyone surviving direct capture by the Urslan, and so the State demands to know how you managed that.

The interrogation chamber has already prepared automated syringes to execute you via lethal injection if you give any answers the State doesn’t like. Those syringes are literally hanging over you during your interrogation as a reminder that you’d best choose your words very carefully. Given your extraordinary circumstances, you’re questioned by the Great Father himself. That is, until proceedings are disrupted when an invading force of Urslan begins attacking the outer perimeter of the intergalactic territory held by the State of Auroria. The Great Father suspends the charges against you and orders you to put on your armor and get back in the fray.

The deal is, if you manage to repel the invaders without showing any signs of treason as you do so (i.e., being assimilated by the Urslan), your name will be cleared, and you’ll be hailed as a hero. Should you die in the attempt – again, so long as you show no evidence of treason – then “the State will remember your sacrifice.” Thus, with a patriotic slap of encouragement on the shoulder, you’re thrown into the core gameplay loop of Pax Autocratica. There are four intergalactic sectors you’ll play through in the campaign, though one of these won’t be accessible until Pax Autocratica leaves Early Access.

You’re sent through a wormhole into the Tyris System, which contains those sectors. Your job is to repel any enemy forces that have taken control of those sectors and ensure the Tyris System remains under Aurorian control. You start at your forward base in each sector. This is where the “colony sim” part of Pax Autocratica takes the spotlight. You and any troops you have at your disposal can gather resources, construct and upgrade buildings and items, and research new technologies and buildings. Twenty hours of each in-game day are designated as “work hours,” which leaves precious little time for sleep.

As the Leader of the base, you don’t have to personally do anything except lead some of your troops on expeditions through the sector. You’re entirely allowed, and even encouraged, to delegate all the gathering, crafting, building, and researching to your troops. However, you can still do all those things yourself if you so desire. The time it takes to do any of those activities depends on which troops you’ve assigned to a given task, and their skill level at that assignment. Thus, you should try to assign work based on the strengths of every individual soldier under your command.

For example, if you’ve got a soldier with a high number of skill points in mining and transporting, but with below average skill points in researching, they’ll be a lot more productive if you order them to go out and mine than they will if you set them to researching new tech. What I think is a really nice touch is that your soldiers can talk with each other and even attempt to help each other improve their respective skills. Keep in mind, though, that this doesn’t always happen, and there’s a chance it can fail when it does.

You have a jetpack you can use to observe your base from above. That’s exactly what you’ll do when you press a button to enter Construction Mode, Destruction Mode, or Relocation Mode. You can cycle through all the different buildings you know how to construct and tell your troops exactly what you want built and where. Assuming you have the necessary resources, you can place as many construction orders at a time as you need. Every available soldier will drop what they’re doing and come help with any unfinished construction orders; you can pitch in, too, if you see fit.

You’ll need to prioritize buildings that both keep your soldiers in fighting shape and enable you to advance technologically and militarily against your enemies. Building barracks, medical facilities, kitchens, and mess halls for your soldiers is equally as important as building and upgrading the Command Center and the Tactical Bureau to research new buildings and tech. When you want to go out on an expedition, you head to the landing pad and board your ship. You can have multiple ships in a fleet in addition to your flagship; each additional ship in your fleet can carry more soldiers.

You can choose which of your soldiers are assigned to which ship. Everyone you don’t deploy onto a ship will stay at the base and keep themselves busy while you’re gone. Thus, you can queue up several research and construction projects, then leave on an expedition, and every task you set up will likely have finished by the time you return. This means you’ll often have to choose between bringing your best soldiers into battle alongside you or having them stay behind to help the base in whatever ways they’re best at. That adds some well-implemented strategy into Pax Autocratica.

When you’re on an expedition, you’ll see nearby points of interest to which you can order your fleet to travel. You might find small, lush planets or mineral-rich asteroids you can harvest to take crafting materials back to your base. Occasionally, you’ll find helpful things like beacons that allow you to change which troops are aboard your fleet without having to return to base, or the occasional planet where you can safely rest if your troops are fatigued. Most commonly, however, you’ll find points controlled by enemies that you’ll need to capture militarily. That’s where Pax Autocratica adds in its FPS elements.

You’ll land on whatever point you need to capture and lead your troops into battle. Your objectives are always visible and clearly spelled out for you, which I massively appreciate. If any of your troops die in battle, they’re considered acceptable casualties, and you’re expected to carry on without them. If you die in battle, however, you’ll instead be rushed back to base and restored to full health. You’ll lose a portion of any resources you collected on the failed expedition before you died, though you’ll keep important things like upgrade blueprints and captured enemy prisoners. I’ll come back to that momentarily.

While your fleet is on an expedition, enemies grow stronger in real time. That means you’ll have to balance harvesting resources with ensuring you haven’t dawdled for so long that you can’t win any potential battles. Enemy strength resets to zero whenever you end an expedition, but so does the progress you’ve made toward capturing the sector. There’s nothing wrong with running several expeditions just to gather enough resources to craft the upgrades you need to defeat stronger enemies, though having to do so can be tedious and frustrating. This strategy is often well worth the wait in my experience.

Whenever you’ve won enough battles during a single expedition to reach 100% progress in the sector, you’ll unlock what’s called a “decisive battle.” As you might expect, these are more difficult combat encounters with multiple objectives that may take quite a while to accomplish. Thankfully, in these situations, you and your troops will often be reinforced with additional, unnamed NPCs to help bolster your numbers. You can issue commands to nearby troops during combat, which is really helpful if you need them to do something specific or you want to take a particular approach to battle.

You can use consumable “capture rounds” during combat to attempt to subdue and imprison any weakened enemies. The stronger and higher level an enemy is, the more likely your attempts to capture them will fail. Should you succeed, however, you’ll bring any captives back to base with you upon ending the current expedition. If you’ve built any prisons that have available cells, you can store captives there while you decide their ultimate fate. If you have no available prison cells, the captives are kept in your character’s inventory until you do something with them. I’d rather not think about exactly how that works.

You have several options for dealing with captives. You can attempt to indoctrinate them and have them join your army, which you do via both talking to them and – well, I guess there’s no point sugarcoating it – torturing them via electrocution. These can only be done with each prisoner once per in-game day, and there’s always the chance they’ll die while being tortured. If you successfully break their will, you can recruit them as soldiers under your command. You can also just immediately execute them. This will negatively affect your troops’ morale and fear levels, however, which can lead to bigger problems.

Then there’s the Soldier Training Center, where you can outright sacrifice some of your soldiers (and/or crafting materials, but that’s much less emphasized) in order to level up and improve other troops. You can eliminate any captives this way, as well as any soldiers under your command who have become disloyal enough to attempt desertion. I don’t know what concerns me more: how much thought has been put into capturing and dealing with prisoners of war, or how much I enjoy this aspect of Pax Autocratica. I probably shouldn’t say much more on the subject, lest I end up on any watch lists.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with Pax Autocratica in its current state. Even though it’s currently in Early Access, there’s quite a lot of content available that I’ve almost universally enjoyed. While I was working on this preview, there was an unexpected hiccup when Pax Autocratica was made unplayable for a few days due to a bad update that caused it to crash on launch. That has since been sorted out, though I wasn’t expecting the update that fixed that issue to be 25 gigabytes in size. I’d definitely recommend keeping an eye on Pax Autocratica if I’ve piqued your interest.

A PC review copy of Pax Autocratica was provided by Multiverse for this preview.